


On the Inheritance of Evil, and other fairytales

by Lacinia



Category: Angel: the Series, Luther (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, just go with it, the timelines don't work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-09
Updated: 2012-06-09
Packaged: 2017-11-07 09:31:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/429492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lacinia/pseuds/Lacinia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have much in common, like a willingness to be the villain and a weakness for men who failed to be heroes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Inheritance of Evil, and other fairytales

When she is eight years old, Lilah moves across an ocean. Her new classmates tease her for her foreign syllables, repeating her words mockingly and pushing her to the ground. With the single-mindedness that Lilah will later apply to history classes, to the bar exam, and to one Wesley Wyndam-Price she obliterates her accent in record time. She practices every night at home, and when she debuts her new American voice it is pitch perfect. The mild tones of the American mid-west make her sound like a stranger. She relishes the disguise, and during recess methodically destroys all of her tormentors’ belongings. 

  


 

Lilah skipped first grade and asks to skip fourth as well. Her mother won’t let her because she’s worried about her daughter facing difficulties if placed with older students. Without reason, of course. Lilah’s classmates are by now justifiably terrified of her, and she can’t imagine that older children will be more difficult to handle. 

  


 

Lilah is ten years old when the husband that Prudence Cartwright, neé Morgan, followed to a new continent leaves them. “Just shows you can’t rely on anyone,” Prudence tells her daughter, and even as Lilah holds her hand as she cries Lilah thinks, _weak_. 

  


 

When Lilah is thirteen, her father dies in a car crash with the woman he left her mother for, and she barely even spares a roll of her eyes. 

  


 

When she is sixteen, one of Lilah’s fucking teachers finds out about her mother, already forgetting things like bills and groceries and where she is. The state wants Prudence hospitalized, wants Lilah sent back to the family she barely knows. Lilah has just been accepted to Harvard and finds this completely unacceptable. She spends hours with legal books and finds her first loophole. After successfully suing for emancipation, she takes the opportunity to finally, legally change her name. Morgan is so much more _her_. 

  


 

When she’s twenty-five and winning promotions at Wolfram and Hart like it’s a race ( _isn’t it?_ ), Lindsay MacDonald forwards her an email from the London branch HR department, with the subject line “someone you know?” _Of course he’s gotten hold of my personnel file, the bastard_ , she thinks. The report, from a member of the recruitment team, calls Alice Morgan “brilliant” and “personable” and suggests that she doesn’t have the knife’s edge of ambition and the biting cruelty to fit in at W&H. Lilah, remembering her younger cousin gleefully cutting open dormice to see what was inside, dismisses them as incompetent and has another recruiter sent. 

  


 

As girls they didn’t much like each other and resented that they were pushed together at family events. Lilah hated getting her hands dirty; Alice was always thinking of the stars.  
  
As women, they don’t think of each other, for all that they have much in common, like a willingness to be the villain and a weakness for men who failed to be heroes. 

  


 

At their cousin’s wedding they dance around each other. Alice has turned down W&H employment: she has all the independence of a jaguar and has refused to sign the contract. She has all the power she wants. Alice does not swallow the lies about Lilah’s work; Lilah’s eyes skim past Alice’s false smiles. 

  


 

When she is thirty-two Lilah dies in those L.A. riots no one was ever able to explain. Or doesn’t, it’s complicated. Alice goes to her funeral and looks appropriately sad. Between the burial and the service she snatches a moment alone with the open casket and pushes aside Lilah’s high collar to see her stitched-up wound.  
  
She leans in, close. “Does this mean I win?” she whispers. 

  


 

Alice kills a man. Well, another man. When they lock her up in a brick building with high walls, John gives her an apple and she runs away. She takes to wearing huge sunglasses and she pays a man to make her a fake I.D., but refuses to dye her hair.  
  
Lilah asks her if she’s still so sure she doesn’t want to work for W&H. Alice thinks about it, says, “I’m willing to listen to an offer.”


End file.
